Sustainable Fashion
by Beth Esponnette
Many of us now know that the fashion industry is wasteful - it's set up in a way that just encourages trash, with the processes involved sending half of products to landfill within a year. We are stuck in a take - make - waste production model. It hasn't always been this way, though, and there is a lot of hope for us to design our way out of this mess. This seminar gave an overview of the history of clothing's production methods, examined how the industry got itself stuck on these devastating practices, considered fashion's next generation tech in materials, manufacturing, and retail, and finished with a behind-the-scenes look at unspun's technology.
Beth Esponnette, a scientist and designer, cofounded fashion-tech startup unspun in order to solve big, sticky problems in the fashion industry. unspun is building an inclusive and sustainable fashion industry through custom-fit, on-demand manufacturing (read: body scan jeans made with 3D weaving robotics), and has been recognized as a Best Invention by TIME Magazine, Best of What's New winner by Popular Science, and Global Change Award winner by H&M. Before unspun, Beth developed products in the outdoor apparel industry, instructed at a machine shop, helped design robot-human soft good interfaces, and taught product design as an Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon. Throughout her career, she's been fascinated by nature's obvious yet overlooked knack for circular manufacturing. She serves as a SBIR proposal reviewer for the US National Science Foundation and received a BS in Fiber Science & Apparel Design from Cornell and an MFA in Design from Stanford.
You can watch the video from the seminar on YouTube here.
